Can the Dictionary Keep Up?

(thenation.com)

17 points | by pepys 3 days ago ago

5 comments

  • ChadNauseam 2 days ago ago

    I have been thinking about this myself. I'm working on some custom dictionaries for words I discover from my corpus of movie subtitles. Which I'm sure is not a new idea, but it's fun, because it gives me a dictionary that only contains the words that people "actually use", and with "real" example sentences. (words in quotes because movie dialogue isn't 100% as real as I'd like.)

    I'm sure this is not a remotely new idea, but I'm having fun with it. I also like that I can see how common every form of every word is. I was surprised to learn that almost none of the most common words are nouns. And in my internal tools I can filter by movies released a certain date to track changes, which is neat.

    • twentyfiveoh1 2 days ago ago

      if your movie collection is big enough that might be really useful for language learning. Create your own frequency lists and common phrases. I would be curious how it stacks up against the written word.

      • ChadNauseam 2 days ago ago

        That's exactly what I'm using it for! And my movie collection is pretty big. I have about 1000 movies. (Many are translated, but also many are not.)

    • 1718627440 a day ago ago

      I mean all words were added to a dictionary because someone was using them. It's just that they may not be used by people in your particular region or time.

  • twentyfiveoh1 2 days ago ago